How to turn iPhone (HEIC) photos into a PDF

If you've ever tried to send an iPhone photo to a Windows colleague, you know the dance: you attach it, they reply "what's a HEIC file?", you go back into Photos, switch the format to JPEG, re-export, re-send. Multiply that by a stack of receipts or a child's permission slip and the morning is gone.

There's a better path: combine the HEIC files directly into a single PDF, in your browser, in about a minute. No file conversion. No Acrobat. Nothing uploaded.

Why HEIC isn't friendly outside Apple

HEIC (and its sibling HEIF) is the format Apple started using in iOS 11 to make photos smaller without losing quality. The catch is that everywhere else — Windows, most web tools, older Android phones, document scanners — HEIC isn't natively supported. So when you AirDrop or email those photos to anyone outside the Apple world, they get a file their device shrugs at.

A PDF, by contrast, opens on every device built in the last twenty years. Combining HEIC images into a PDF is the universal "send this to someone" trick.

The 60-second method

1. Open the HEIC to PDF tool. Drag the HEIC photos onto the page — straight from Finder, the iOS Files app shared to your Mac, or wherever they live.
2. Reorder if needed. Your photos appear as thumbnails. Drag any of them to a new position to change the order they'll appear in the PDF.
3. Pick a page size. Choose A4 or Letter for a standard document feel, or "Fit to image" to make every page exactly the size of the photo it contains. For receipts and screenshots, "Fit to image" looks cleanest.
4. Pick a margin. "None" is best when you want the photo to fill the page; "Narrow" or "Normal" leaves a tidy white border.
5. Click Make PDF and download. The output is a single, ordinary, opens-anywhere PDF.

Your photos never leave your device. The HEIC decoding runs in a small WebAssembly library inside the browser tab.

When to mix HEIC with regular JPGs or PNGs

Some pages of your document might come from a non-iPhone source — a screenshot, a scanned receipt, a PNG export. You can drop those into the same tool. They'll be combined in the same order, on the same pages. If you need a JPG-only or PNG-only workflow without HEIC at all, use JPG to PDF or PNG to PDF — same engine, same options, simpler dropzone.

Tips for clean-looking results

Photograph documents straight on. If you're shooting a paper receipt or form, take the photo from directly above and as flat as possible. Photos taken at an angle look skewed when printed, and "page size: Fit to image" can't fix that.

Crop before you drop, when it matters. iPhone Photos has a built-in crop tool that's fast. If you're making a PDF of a long restaurant bill, crop out the table around it first so the receipt fills the frame.

Don't downscale prematurely. The tool embeds your photos at full resolution by default. If file size becomes an issue, you can re-export the JPEGs at lower quality from Photos before dropping them in — but for most "send this email attachment" use cases, the default is fine.

Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between HEIC and HEIF?

HEIC is Apple's name for files using the HEIF container with HEVC-encoded image data. In practice they're the same thing for most users, and our tool accepts both extensions.

Will the output PDF be smaller than the original photos?

Usually yes for HEIC — when we decode HEIC to embed in the PDF, we re-encode as JPEG at high quality. JPEG of a photo is typically a bit larger than HEIC, but the combined PDF is generally smaller than the sum of the original HEICs because the PDF container deduplicates.

Does the PDF preserve photo metadata (date, GPS)?

No. The PDF wraps the visible image only — EXIF metadata from the original photos isn't carried over. If you need the GPS coordinates, save the original HEIC alongside.

Can I add a cover page or a title?

Not in this tool. For now, the first photo in your order becomes the first page. If you need a typed cover page, create one as an image first (Pages, Keynote, even a screenshot) and drop it in as page 1.

Is anything uploaded?

No. The entire conversion — including the HEIC decode — happens in your browser using a WebAssembly library. Your photos never reach our server. There's no signup and no account.

What about Live Photos?

We extract just the still image — the motion clip in a Live Photo is dropped. For a PDF, that's almost always what you want.

Working with the rest of the toolkit

Once you have the PDF, you might want to do more with it. Fill out a PDF form you've just turned into one. Add a signature if it's a contract or invoice. Protect it with a password before emailing if it's a sensitive document.

For the original-iPhone-photos-to-PDF flow, this one tool is usually all you need. About 60 seconds, browser-only, and the result opens on any device your recipient owns.